And The Waves Came Crashing Down

“Oh please God!” I was shaking, I was trembling, my heart rate was accelerating at a violent speed, I was sure that I would have a heart attack at any moment.
“It isn’t real. I’m not that bad. I’ve made mistakes but this isn’t going to be one of them!” I screamed the words vehemently at myself, the words ricocheting like bullets through the tiny, enclosed interior of my car. I hurt my throat yelling the words, as if the pain of screaming could somehow erase the two pink lines slashed across the loathsome white stick in my hand.
I was living in Hawaii – paradise – and I had recently learned that being single was fun. I had discovered the joys of reporting to know one, being accountable to only myself, sleeping when I chose, seeing who I wished, going as I desired. Single life was intoxicating and gratifying and I had decided I would never leave it behind. But then I peed on a stick, shoved said stick in a bag, tossed it into the passenger seat of my car, and drove out to a hidden spot of rocky beach.
“I’m not pregnant,” I whispered to myself. I pulled the stick out of the bag, turned on an overhead light, read the dreaded message in those two lines, and listened as outside my car, the waves came crashing down.
~ ~ ~
My entire childhood I was perceived as the black sheep of my extremely conservative, mild-mannered, church-going family. There were twelve of us counting my parents. Two were authoritarian and the other nine were obedient, peaceful, willing to except rules at their word. I was rebellious, eager to break rules and promises and rush into the dangerous surf that was life outside of my protective family. They were content on dry land and I wasn’t content unless I had nearly drowned in my mistakes.
At eighteen I fled the shelter of my home, enlisted in the military, got orders, hopped a plane and flew far away from Arkansas to the wild, loose-hanging, tropics of Hawaii. Here there were no critiquing eyes or ominous stares of judgment. Here there were no rules or speed limits or lifeguards; there was only exhilarating freedom the likes of which I had never known. I picked up a cigarette, I picked up a boyfriend, I picked up profanity, and I picked up sex. I picked up the pieces of all the rules I had so gleefully shattered and dumped them into the oceans of the world.
Arkansas had been my prison for seven years. With so many children my parents had whisked us away to the Bible-belt state, declaring “It’s our job to protect you!” They moved us down miles of winding, dry dirt road, isolated from the influences of the world, secure from mistakes we could not take back, ensconced in the simplicity and good intentions of a small, church-going community. “At the end of this road I can see anyone and anything coming,” my dad one day said to us. I wonder if he ever looked down the road and saw me going.
I spent those years running through the woods, inhaling clean and pure air; I dove into crystal lakes and chased the slithering roads to wherever they would lead but always, always, I was a landlocked ocean, roiling and quivering to be set free. I was desperate to break the surface and make a new way.
Hawaii gave me everything I wanted and I gave it everything I needed until I found myself, heaving and turning, at the bottom, caught in a tide of my own doing, with no choice but to swim with the current or be dragged forever under.
~ ~ ~
“But I don’t want to tell him!” I pleaded with my best friend. The thought of telling the guy I was sleeping with about the pregnancy was more terrifying than the pregnancy itself. To tell him would be to open myself up to commitment. I didn’t want that! But what if he did? Ugh! Shudders ran through me. Too bad my best friend was also really good friends with the guy I was casually seeing.
“You tell him or I will,” she said. “It’s only fair.”
I hated her and her self-righteous sense of fairness in that moment but the look in her eyes dared me to test her resolve. Fine. I would tell him and pray he took off.
I was a mess by the time I got to his place. Mascara ran down my face in blackened streaks, troubled inlets of the night time ocean, pouring over and revealing the feelings in my core at that moment. He was thrilled to see me, then worried.
“What’s up?” His voice was hesitant.
I took that horrible stick and flung it on the ground in front of him. “That’s what’s up.”
He took one look at it and broke into a grin that would make the Cheshire cat envious. He was thrilled? I was shocked. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? He was supposed to be pissed and I was supposed to be free to go my own way. But no, he smiled like I had handed him heaven and another wave tumbled down on me.
~ ~ ~
I broke all the rules growing up; I took them and I tossed them aside like unwanted clutter when I moved away from Arkansas. I tried but there was always, gnawing away at me, the nature vs. nurture of my upbringing. I was raised to do the right thing by other people. “There are times you don’t come first,” my mom would say to me again and again, her eyes serious and demanding. “Sometimes there are bigger aspects in play than your immediate desires and feelings,” my dad would add when I found myself so wrapped up in me that I forgot there was a whole world out there. These things were ingrained in me, nurtured in me. And yet, these things are also a part of who I am.
Like an ocean before a Tsunami – calm but deadly and ready to overtake underneath the surface – these things pulled far back and then crashed up inside of me in that moment he smiled so beautifully at me. They siphoned up and flooded over into my mind and pressed my desire down, down, down. He was grabbing me, hugging me, spinning me around and I was dizzy and the world was spinning and, oh God please don’t let this be real! But it was real. It was reality in him leaning back, looking at me, “If it’s a girl, can we please name her Emily?” Now I really couldn’t breathe. I really was drowning and I couldn’t find my way back to the surface because now there was more than me.
Now there was a man who wanted this baby so badly. Now there was a child forming that would one day want a father. Now there was a man willing to be a dad and now there was a child who would one day wonder why I stole her chance to have a father who had loved her so dearly from the very first moment.
~ ~ ~
A month later, I walked out of a courthouse with a man who was acting like he had won the lottery and professing endless love to me. I smiled woodenly, nodded in false happiness, and tried to stay afloat.
He told everyone. I told no one. He called his family. I never once mentioned it to my family. He raved about how wonderful being married to me would be and he drove me to the beach. He took my hand and asked how I was. I looked at the ocean, wishing I could run into it and swim far away from reality. I looked at him.
“You know I don’t love you,” I said quietly.
He smiled tenderly. “But someday you will,” he spoke confidently. And he said it in such a way, with such conviction, that for the first time since it had started, I didn’t feel the wave that came crashing down.